No Hard Drive is going to stand up to a offroad racing truck. Use a RAM-based rocketdrive, or a series of 1GB Solid State CF drives. Lexsells an Via based Book that fills your needs pretty well, except that it doesn't come anywhere near 2Ghz. But it does run off of 60w, 12v that it could pull directly from the vehicle. It also runs remarkably cool, has hard disk slots (Bad idea) and a CF slot, 1-3 ethernet ports and 2 firewire ports, and upto 512MB Ram. Clamp a 120mm fan (with filter) to the back, and it should have no trouble running through Death Valley.
The better question is, of course, what are you going to do that you think you need a chip that draws 69W of power? Applying photoshop filters to live streaming video of your races, to be sent out over software firewire 802.11g adapters? Generate 3D maps on the fly from bumper-mounted webcams and compare that to existing topological maps to ascertain position?
1) How are they going to ensure that all programs are registered, without some form of ET-ware? Do you really trust any such ET-ware to report only what it's supposed to??
Yeah, I'm a little giving when it comes to what people say their ETware is tracking. I generally trust their privacy policies. I can understand the fear, but we're already swamped with software that phones home. XP, Mozilla, ZoneAlarm, AdAware... Software update checking is not terribly different from registration checking.
But I don't think it will come down to programs phoning in or not working. You could have tech support, or the updates, or any or all of the generally expected services contigent upon registration. You have to register the programs *now* to make them work, I fail to see why this would be so different.
Besides, you don't need a perfect record to stop companies from casually pirating. If they BS a block of numbers, chances are some of those will be already registered somewhere else, or won't have been shipped yet.
2) Who's going to audit things on *their* end, to make sure their records aren't, ah, selective? (The BSA, maybe??) Because otherwise it's like having the fox guard the henhouse.
Good point. I suppose then you would need the records to prove ownership, as a last fallback. But after the first few mistakes I would expect a rather large class-action lawsuit to come down, by anyone and everyone the BSA or the companies ever caught.
If you are really worried about Trust, it could be overseen by Trust-E (are they still around?), or the backend could be Open Sourced. But the companies have a vested (though occasionally forgotten) interest in not creating a customer backlash. Especially not for the tiny income that comes from double-dipping a small percentage of your customers. This of course only applies to non-monopolies... and in those other cases the BSA should take responsibility.
Of course, that convicted monopolist that-shall-not-be-named already implements a system much more strenuous than this. Sadly, though, it doesn't seem to have written the 10 lines of perl scripts necessary to automate their audit process.
What else, what else is this plan missing. Or should we head to the BSA with a petition right now?
Not quite. The software doesn't care what platform it's on, and doesn't have to be prevented from self-modification. The privacy conscious public doesn't seem to mind typing a registration number into a program, and it doesn't seem to mind that the registration number gets sent to the publisher. Shareware publishers keep track of which registration numbers are only used once / twice and which ones are used hundreds of times. Quake, Warcraft... Nearly all professional games do the same thing. I'm not advocating a hardware solution, or even a particularly hard solution.
The serial can't be faked because if it is, it is either a duplicate or meaningless. You have no intrusions into the person's computer, the protection is in the intelligent design of the system. Nothing intrusive. No privacy issues. User retains full control of their system. No user hardware changes. The only protected hardware is the servers that companies keep to keep track of how many times a product has been registered... something Ambrosia has been doing with their games since 1988, but nobody screams "privacy" at them.
I really don't see the problem. Or have I been trolled?
1. How does the buttons on this bad little boy stand up to the dual task of dialing and game playing? Did you find yourself hitting the wrong number instead of the raised button?
2. Nokia mentions 3D capability, but refuses to list real tech specs in their tech specs section... or for that matter any real screenshots. How would you rate the 3D rendering capabilities you saw on this early model?
3. I'm quite worried about the screen orientation. It seems all wrong for playing anything other than vertical shooters. How did the aspect ratio effect the play of Tomb Raider?
Don't get me wrong, I'm excited about all of this. I love the promise held in the launch of any new console... and a Symbian-based console gets extra bounus points. But if the feel of the controllers and the screen is wrong, that could severely hamper acceptance.
So allay my fears, if you would be so kind. Buttons? Screen? Rendering?
This is the most important thing for a computer lab administrator to take care of.
It's a sad, sad day when the most important thing a computer lab administrator can take care of is CYA maneuvers for legally purchased software.
Just because it is so hard to prove software piracy doesn't mean the burden of proof falls on the defendent. Software makers by now have shunned the thing that could actually make this trivial: online registration of single codes. If you have codes that are in use outside of your IP block, or you are registering more machines than you have licences for inside of a reasonable upgrade cycle, you're busted. If you can't press the little "audit" button upon request to re-send the legitimate codes, you're busted. This technique has worked for many years in shareware, and is only avoidable if you stealth the thing and don't send information back upon first registration. But if you are audited, your stealth-mode fails, and you are forced to comply. Or at least, you *should* comply, and I don't know of any court who would consider a 10 minute walk around the lab pushing a little Help->Send Audit button an unreasonable request. It could even be exported to disk, for those machines not on the wider network, because what you are checking for is simply the existance of legitimate, non-duplicate registration codes.
Until such a time that the business software companies get their act in line with the higher practices of, of all people, shareware and videogame companies, they do not deserve to command the balance of proof.
It's very legitimate to lose your registration papers. Labs with high turnover rates or multiple location transfers lose lots of things... And it only takes one person forgetting to tell their successor that the Mathlab box from 1987 (which has since been upgraded to Mathlab 89, 92, 96, 99, and 2003) is the official box with all of the important recipts, and you've lost your registrations. Put it in a file folder? With the thousands of pages of documentation a Lab generates? That will be lost even quicker, relegated to a storage room somewhere and forgotten for eternity.
No, it's better if the software keeps track of its own legality, in a way that can't be faked. This would increase slightly the overhead on software companies, but THEY are the ones with the burden of proof. If it increases the cost of the software by 5 dollars, that's a lot cheaper than the thousands for a full software audit.
I hope you're not referring to PG Tips. I keep coming by people form England who swear by that junk. I'll take loose-leaf Twinnings english breakfast any day above that junk.
And if you mean in resturants... Ok, there is no good tea in resturants. We've been on a quest here for good High Tea for several years, and so far the only really good cup of tea came from the Russian Tea Room in New York, now defunct, and the Russian Tea Room (ripoff) in Chicago next to the IAC. The Boston Harbor Hotel isn't bad either.
Of course, nothing comes close to a good cup of Mate, containing recently several recently identified and still legal stimulants. But finding a resturant serving real Mate in North America is far more rare than finding High Tea.
Have you seen the picture of the thing? It looks like a 3 foot tall bee. I'd be more worried about it trying to assimilate the human race.
"What can I do for you master? Bzz... Bzz... You haven't fulfilled your honey production quotient master... Bzz... Bzz... We think you're not doing your part for the hive... I'm going to grasp at you futiley with my nonopposable hands until you give in to the collective's needs. Bzz..."
(That buzzing noise is the hard drive, of course)
Seriously, though, Props for the Chobits reference. If I had moderator points, you would get one of them.
Thinkpad 390+ 1st battery unusable after 1 year, no stats available 2nd battery 10.8V, 4.8Ah, hasn't been able to power a system for more than 5 minutes in the past 2 years.
1 year is *not* acceptable battery life. We have a 98 G3 ibook which still gets about 2 hours of MP3 playback, and a Dell ultralight (don't know the model, it isn't here right now) about 2 years old which still gets about 3 hours of use.
Perhaps it is the silly notion of only taxing that which is enforceable, but having purchased online too numerous to count amount of items of too little value to care, I fail to see how this passed without some sort of minimum price. Right now a chocolate company in California is sending samples for about the price of a cup of coffee. This is why sales tax is extracted at the point of sale, not n months after such a thing has occurred.
It's ironic that very few states are enforcing this... This has to be the one tax burden that the states realize is both unenforceable but also impossible to comply with.
Why didn't we kick out this law when we got rid of the one banning tattooing?
A server with a gui is like a gymnast with a carry-on bag. If you want it to shine, it should run from the command line. Servers only, of course. Desktops are a totally different matter.
-C
Re:Big legal mistake...
on
Kazaa Fights Back
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Please. No legal leg to stand on. You want the legal protection of being considered a "business entity" under United States Law, you need to have no blood on your hands. Anotherwards, your business can't be illegal. You will not be awarded jack shit in court if you can't prove that your business is legal.
Please. Oil companies? Monsanto? Microsoft? Meat Packing? It's not blood, a little green wipes the red right out. It's green. I don't want to be one more person that cries out about big business owning our government, but you realize that Enron is still around, don't you?
Again: this is makes no sense whatsoever. Anyone who owns a copyright is entitled under copyright law to legally defend that copyright, music (monopoly) / industry included...especially if the distributor doesn't legally have permission (from the copyright owner) to distribute the music...permission would include ownership of the distributed media or rights granted by the owner to distribute the copyrighted material. Neither case exists for Kazaa.
You (and a lot of other people) are misreading here. Because of the special status afforded music in this culture, and the blanket licensing terms for radio and other playback, there are certain circumstances under which a company cannot legally refuse to license music. They cannot refuse to wholesale CD's to anyone but BMG record stores, for example. The labels arguably have done this, as exampled by the many online music ventures that failed to receive licenses for music while the industry was plotting its own services.
1) Establishing itself (at least in part...even a part as small as an office building) as a business in the United States...You sue in the United States, you're a legal target in the United States, plain and simple.
What part of the Sklyarov / Abode E-books thing did you miss? You are already falling under US jurisdiction if you do a portion of your business with US customers. Now, the US can rule all it wants, but it can't put the equivalent of a lien on a bank in Morocco without approval of the Moroccan court system. They could take the American office, but I'm sure that's rented.
If you had read the article, you would know that they are suing not for the right to illegally distribute content, but that they are suing because the RIAA had illegally prevented Kazaa from licensing content.
In Go, this would be called a KO fight. This does not preclude or even reference the legal challenge against Kazaa's network, but in response to that it challenges an illegal practice of the music industry which could shut it down. One could destroy the other, or vice versa. The industry would seem to have the upper hand with more lawyers, but if you read the wired article (now mysteriously down) Kazaa has an amazing network of cross-border legal hurdles necessary for the music industry to jump before cutting off the company that produces the software, at which point the software will still be functional and loose in the wild. They have an amazingly large number of liberties (again, GO), and both sides are vulnerable.
That fight, sadly, will probably go to the money. But a slap on the wrist by the judge might be enough to require the companies open up to actual licensing of online content, as opposed to shutting down competitors. The justice system is currently terrified of bringing to justice anything large, but Java is now shipping with Windows. Kazaa *might* have enough legal wiggleroom to then license content and have the previous charges thrown out on the grounds that they weren't holding their copyrights properly.
In other words, if they play the game good enough, they can force the music industry into licensing to them, transition to a probably much more profitable paid service, and come out the other side squeaky clean. Whatever lawyer thought this up earned their paycheck.
How did this parent get modded up to 5 insightful? He obviously didn't read the article.
I thought the courts had already ruled that making copies of your music for close friends was fair use, and who in turn could make copies for other people. If I'm remembering correctly, it is illegal for the friend to come over and copy your disks, but you can do it for them.
Still, while I somehow I doubt the theoretical fair use construct would hold up under the weight of 5 GB of material, I have seen friendly trading exceed that by several orders of magnitude.
Since fair use isn't written into law, we can't exactly look it up. Still though, it's good to know there are new ways besides drug laws to turn promising young men and women into lifetime criminals.
Interesting idea. How about the 3 stooges effect? Use a much hyped and "loved" band's soon-to-be-released video and single to carry a bomb? Like the Star Wars trailer attached to Wing Commander (ironically both series Mark Hammill was attached to)? Along with those boring trailers for movies you don't want to see, and quizzes that wouldn't challenge a 3 year old, you could have the latest Janet Jackson video blasted in front of thousands of eager listeners who paid, in part, to watch the video. What better way to make sales than project a video across a 2 story screen with Digital THX sound and a captive audience?
Love the Fugees? They're playing with "How to lose a guy" at a theartre near you.
This sounds like it could really work. So on second thought, let's never mention this again.
-c
Of course, this kind of synergy happens all the time, as more movies are being (ab)used as platforms to promote bands the label/movie studio wants to sell. Joss did a great service to many small bands by including them in episodes of Buffy, but that power is now being abused to try and make hip the stale.
And for that matter, 8 mile. Eww. Let's never mention *that* again either.
According to the NY Times Article it is actually only 1 dollar per song. However, Kazaa has completed 7 uploads in the past 3 hours, so the final total stands similarly.
If I'm not mistaken, Corel perished because their focus on cross-platform sales drove them to a misguided two-year development deathmarch into the realm of Java. Porting an entire application suite onto the slowest platform known to man is a good way to never reach a releasable product. Use limewire recently? Would you pay for Limewire? Can you imagine how slow Limewire would be with an inline spellchecker, hyperlinking, dynamic formatting, and hundreds of other clock-nabbing goodies? On computers from several years ago?
According to one of the developers I have spoken with, once optimized it took over 30 seconds to launch.
As WRT Microsoft... I would expect that a Linux port, while eating into their desktop hegemony, would only serve to reinforce their file-format hegemony upon which it is based. If they added an intrinsic windows tax, an extra 200 dollars for Office Linux due to "low demand, complexity of programming in that environment," they could really undermine OpenOffice, Kword, and all of the other desktop suites whose existance on corporate networks is only currently "justified" because the platforms they run on can't run Word. MS keeps office hegemony, and prevents Linux file format problems from truly cracking Windows hegemony.
Red Hat obviously has a strategy of simplifying their interface and options, and standardizing across their default installations. As Red Hat gets used more for servers than desktops, the choice of KDE or Gnome seems kind of ridiculous. "Do you want that sandal to come with the velvet or suede winter boot cover option?" If I want a computer to be bogged down in UI, I would (and do) install Mandrake. If I want a svelte sverver install across many machines with service, Red Hat would be a good option. Do I care if I can write shell scripts in Koffice? Not really.
If anything, a dropping of KDE would allow Red Hat to focus on what it does best, and would make clearer the distinction between several different distros. I say go for it, my felt fedora friends. KDE away! And the mice shall play.
Having tested (and deleted) a copy of the beautiful Maya rendering program with pixar extensions protected by flexim, I can assure you it hasn't been silenced.
The grandparent to this post is right, Flexim works because it provides an authoratative, though not necessarily effective, way to keep your legal licencees in line. Who cares if a group of smart 18 year olds with absolutely nothing else to do all day can crack it in a months? Our youth have always been more intelligent than we gave them credit for, but our youth don't go on to make feature-length multimillion dollar films, or the other uses that flexim protects against.
I hate to point this out, but as i mentioned on another thread, at bare minimum settings and assuming an 80% failure rate, Kazaa transfers 1 song every hour and a half. At 20 dollars per cd, the RIAA could push it as high as $2.50 per track, which over the course of 6 months would put you comfortably in the realm of 12 thousand dollars.
You can still leech safely and face only civil penalties, but any real amount of noding will push you over $1,000 easily. I have seen computers upload that much AT ONE TIME.
Still, if they grab 100 sharers as test cases, and there is 4 million users on right now, with 10% of them sharing, you only have a 1 in 40,000 chance of getting nabbed. The test cases will probably find adequate legal representation, as I know for one I will contribute to a legal defense fund of those who believe music wants to be free, or at least less than 20 dollars a f'ing CD.
1. The incentive is to do the right thing. There are still a lot of people out there who believe stealing music is at its heart wrong. I know I do, and I think most Kazaa people do too. But I also think that we do this to protest the current state of the music industry. All of the musicians I know still charge for their music, yet except for one, they all have put their own files on a P2P network.
2. According to RIAA figures, only 1 in 10 bands it has hand-signed and selected is profitable. What they forget to mention, leaving you to connect the dots yourself, is that "profitable" means that they made money above and beyond recoupable costs. The Distributing companies wind up eating some costs, but so far the band has made *nothing at all.* Under such circumstances, it would be a lot better to make 50c per album straight than nothing at all. Perhaps we should sell album downloads at 1.00 each, just to make sure the rate is higher than the industry's payout for extremely successful acts?
3. The recording companies are very profitable. The artists are not. There are a lot of artists out there, which loweres their bargining position, but they are the ones who actually make music. The recording companies sell acts: they have no capacity to make music. You don't really need them to get onboard... if I could find DJ Entropy on a paid Kazaa system, why would I want the latest scruffy guitar punk ripoff band?* It would be good for selection to have labels onboard, but it would also be great for quality to have just indies.
Of course, Entropy gives away his albums on his home page, which is one of many reasons why I go out of my way to pay to see him live.
4. This system would give leechers a choice: you can be free or you can be a leech, but you can't be both. I think this choice will satisfy most people. And while it may drive away some of the leeches... isn't that the point? Doesn't that make your network all the better to be a part of?
Anyway, I think this could really work. The only downside I can see is having more sharers than downloaders, as I tend to think that more people would rather have free music legally while uploading than pay to legally download music while leeching. Of course, many of these people don't have jobs and / or credit cards, so I don't fault them.
More ideas?
*This is not to rile against scruffy guitar punk ripoff bands... this is to rile against the scruffy guitar punk ripoff bands who have carefully manicured holes cut in CK shirts and who have an equally manicured sound to appeal to this generation youth extremism with the previous generation of musical voice knockoff.
Interesting, I don't think I can buy any of the MP3's I have on my computer... They're all ripped from CD's. Does that mean the RIAA gets to set the retail CD price, and set it equivalent to the price they recently were (all but) convicted of fixing at a tremendous markup?
If you assume 20 dollars per retail CD, with 8 songs per album, you're docked 2 and a half dollars per album. That's 400 songs, or 30 real albums (albums with more than 8 songs... Kind of like the equivalent of 421 CD Burners). If you have ripped a portion of your CD collection to your drive, that should be enough to push you over the theoretical limit, and somehow I doubt you will be able to convince the judge to look at your Kazaa preferences file to prove that you are only sharing legal fansub anime.
On the other hand, it does say that this distribution must occur during a 180 day period, which would imply that it is not enough to just have music on your machine, but you must actively upload 400 songs in 6 months... or about two per day, irrespective of the total on your hard drive. This sort of rate would be difficult to prove, though I tend to think that judges would accept an average rate extrapolated to a long period of time, rather than requiring the justice department to tap your line for 400 songs. I've seen an older client serve more than that at a single time, but newer ones tend to throttle that to something that won't DOS itself. Still, a newer client throttled down to 3KBps, with sharing on for only one person, can theoretically serve up a song every 16 minutes. If we assume that half of the time the computer sits idle, and 80% of song transfers are aborted / fail %50 of the way through, You get a successful song transfer ($2.50) every hour and a half. If you leave your computer running all of the time (but, as previously mentioned, Kazaa only half the time), you are stealing $6,480 dollars every 180 days from Bertlesman's pockets. Assuming the previous success rates, and the minimum bandwidth / transfer settings for non-scrubs, you would need to have Kazaa running for less than 1.8 hours per day. Not terribly hard, but it is primarily a background task. Perhaps it is time to share only indies and bands with talent?
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No Hard Drive is going to stand up to a offroad racing truck. Use a RAM-based rocketdrive, or a series of 1GB Solid State CF drives. Lexsells an Via based Book that fills your needs pretty well, except that it doesn't come anywhere near 2Ghz. But it does run off of 60w, 12v that it could pull directly from the vehicle. It also runs remarkably cool, has hard disk slots (Bad idea) and a CF slot, 1-3 ethernet ports and 2 firewire ports, and upto 512MB Ram. Clamp a 120mm fan (with filter) to the back, and it should have no trouble running through Death Valley.
The better question is, of course, what are you going to do that you think you need a chip that draws 69W of power? Applying photoshop filters to live streaming video of your races, to be sent out over software firewire 802.11g adapters? Generate 3D maps on the fly from bumper-mounted webcams and compare that to existing topological maps to ascertain position?
What's the secret, Animats?
Yeah, I'm a little giving when it comes to what people say their ETware is tracking. I generally trust their privacy policies. I can understand the fear, but we're already swamped with software that phones home. XP, Mozilla, ZoneAlarm, AdAware... Software update checking is not terribly different from registration checking.
But I don't think it will come down to programs phoning in or not working. You could have tech support, or the updates, or any or all of the generally expected services contigent upon registration. You have to register the programs *now* to make them work, I fail to see why this would be so different.
Besides, you don't need a perfect record to stop companies from casually pirating. If they BS a block of numbers, chances are some of those will be already registered somewhere else, or won't have been shipped yet.
2) Who's going to audit things on *their* end, to make sure their records aren't, ah, selective? (The BSA, maybe??) Because otherwise it's like having the fox guard the henhouse.
Good point. I suppose then you would need the records to prove ownership, as a last fallback. But after the first few mistakes I would expect a rather large class-action lawsuit to come down, by anyone and everyone the BSA or the companies ever caught.
If you are really worried about Trust, it could be overseen by Trust-E (are they still around?), or the backend could be Open Sourced. But the companies have a vested (though occasionally forgotten) interest in not creating a customer backlash. Especially not for the tiny income that comes from double-dipping a small percentage of your customers. This of course only applies to non-monopolies... and in those other cases the BSA should take responsibility.
Of course, that convicted monopolist that-shall-not-be-named already implements a system much more strenuous than this. Sadly, though, it doesn't seem to have written the 10 lines of perl scripts necessary to automate their audit process.
What else, what else is this plan missing. Or should we head to the BSA with a petition right now?
Not quite. The software doesn't care what platform it's on, and doesn't have to be prevented from self-modification. The privacy conscious public doesn't seem to mind typing a registration number into a program, and it doesn't seem to mind that the registration number gets sent to the publisher. Shareware publishers keep track of which registration numbers are only used once / twice and which ones are used hundreds of times. Quake, Warcraft... Nearly all professional games do the same thing. I'm not advocating a hardware solution, or even a particularly hard solution.
The serial can't be faked because if it is, it is either a duplicate or meaningless. You have no intrusions into the person's computer, the protection is in the intelligent design of the system. Nothing intrusive. No privacy issues. User retains full control of their system. No user hardware changes. The only protected hardware is the servers that companies keep to keep track of how many times a product has been registered... something Ambrosia has been doing with their games since 1988, but nobody screams "privacy" at them.
I really don't see the problem. Or have I been trolled?
Ah the sony Clie XL-9000.... Palm PDA, 20 GB hard drive, 4MP camera, GMS phone, GPS reciever, battery made of kryptonite...
Forget my useless ramble, there be facts up there!
Few questions, maybe you can answer them.
1. How does the buttons on this bad little boy stand up to the dual task of dialing and game playing? Did you find yourself hitting the wrong number instead of the raised button?
2. Nokia mentions 3D capability, but refuses to list real tech specs in their tech specs section... or for that matter any real screenshots. How would you rate the 3D rendering capabilities you saw on this early model?
3. I'm quite worried about the screen orientation. It seems all wrong for playing anything other than vertical shooters. How did the aspect ratio effect the play of Tomb Raider?
Don't get me wrong, I'm excited about all of this. I love the promise held in the launch of any new console... and a Symbian-based console gets extra bounus points. But if the feel of the controllers and the screen is wrong, that could severely hamper acceptance.
So allay my fears, if you would be so kind. Buttons? Screen? Rendering?
It's a sad, sad day when the most important thing a computer lab administrator can take care of is CYA maneuvers for legally purchased software.
Just because it is so hard to prove software piracy doesn't mean the burden of proof falls on the defendent. Software makers by now have shunned the thing that could actually make this trivial: online registration of single codes. If you have codes that are in use outside of your IP block, or you are registering more machines than you have licences for inside of a reasonable upgrade cycle, you're busted. If you can't press the little "audit" button upon request to re-send the legitimate codes, you're busted. This technique has worked for many years in shareware, and is only avoidable if you stealth the thing and don't send information back upon first registration. But if you are audited, your stealth-mode fails, and you are forced to comply. Or at least, you *should* comply, and I don't know of any court who would consider a 10 minute walk around the lab pushing a little Help->Send Audit button an unreasonable request. It could even be exported to disk, for those machines not on the wider network, because what you are checking for is simply the existance of legitimate, non-duplicate registration codes.
Until such a time that the business software companies get their act in line with the higher practices of, of all people, shareware and videogame companies, they do not deserve to command the balance of proof.
It's very legitimate to lose your registration papers. Labs with high turnover rates or multiple location transfers lose lots of things... And it only takes one person forgetting to tell their successor that the Mathlab box from 1987 (which has since been upgraded to Mathlab 89, 92, 96, 99, and 2003) is the official box with all of the important recipts, and you've lost your registrations. Put it in a file folder? With the thousands of pages of documentation a Lab generates? That will be lost even quicker, relegated to a storage room somewhere and forgotten for eternity.
No, it's better if the software keeps track of its own legality, in a way that can't be faked. This would increase slightly the overhead on software companies, but THEY are the ones with the burden of proof. If it increases the cost of the software by 5 dollars, that's a lot cheaper than the thousands for a full software audit.
I hope you're not referring to PG Tips. I keep coming by people form England who swear by that junk. I'll take loose-leaf Twinnings english breakfast any day above that junk.
And if you mean in resturants... Ok, there is no good tea in resturants. We've been on a quest here for good High Tea for several years, and so far the only really good cup of tea came from the Russian Tea Room in New York, now defunct, and the Russian Tea Room (ripoff) in Chicago next to the IAC. The Boston Harbor Hotel isn't bad either.
Of course, nothing comes close to a good cup of Mate, containing recently several recently identified and still legal stimulants. But finding a resturant serving real Mate in North America is far more rare than finding High Tea.
Have you seen the picture of the thing? It looks like a 3 foot tall bee. I'd be more worried about it trying to assimilate the human race.
"What can I do for you master? Bzz... Bzz... You haven't fulfilled your honey production quotient master... Bzz... Bzz... We think you're not doing your part for the hive... I'm going to grasp at you futiley with my nonopposable hands until you give in to the collective's needs. Bzz..."
(That buzzing noise is the hard drive, of course)
Seriously, though, Props for the Chobits reference. If I had moderator points, you would get one of them.
-C
How is this different from Starbucks?
Thinkpad 390+
1st battery unusable after 1 year, no stats available
2nd battery 10.8V, 4.8Ah, hasn't been able to power a system for more than 5 minutes in the past 2 years.
1 year is *not* acceptable battery life. We have a 98 G3 ibook which still gets about 2 hours of MP3 playback, and a Dell ultralight (don't know the model, it isn't here right now) about 2 years old which still gets about 3 hours of use.
Are they following the Gillette model?
Apple shutting down a popular mac-only file sharing service? This from the company that gave us the phrase "Rip, Mix, Burn"?
Sounds like someone's lawyers are once again stupidly overzealous.
Glad to hear they went OS... The best way to avoid legal prosecution since 1995!
Perhaps it is the silly notion of only taxing that which is enforceable, but having purchased online too numerous to count amount of items of too little value to care, I fail to see how this passed without some sort of minimum price. Right now a chocolate company in California is sending samples for about the price of a cup of coffee. This is why sales tax is extracted at the point of sale, not n months after such a thing has occurred.
It's ironic that very few states are enforcing this... This has to be the one tax burden that the states realize is both unenforceable but also impossible to comply with.
Why didn't we kick out this law when we got rid of the one banning tattooing?
A server with a gui is like a gymnast with a carry-on bag. If you want it to shine, it should run from the command line. Servers only, of course. Desktops are a totally different matter.
-C
Please. Oil companies? Monsanto? Microsoft? Meat Packing? It's not blood, a little green wipes the red right out. It's green. I don't want to be one more person that cries out about big business owning our government, but you realize that Enron is still around, don't you?
Again: this is makes no sense whatsoever. Anyone who owns a copyright is entitled under copyright law to legally defend that copyright, music (monopoly) / industry included...especially if the distributor doesn't legally have permission (from the copyright owner) to distribute the music...permission would include ownership of the distributed media or rights granted by the owner to distribute the copyrighted material. Neither case exists for Kazaa.
You (and a lot of other people) are misreading here. Because of the special status afforded music in this culture, and the blanket licensing terms for radio and other playback, there are certain circumstances under which a company cannot legally refuse to license music. They cannot refuse to wholesale CD's to anyone but BMG record stores, for example. The labels arguably have done this, as exampled by the many online music ventures that failed to receive licenses for music while the industry was plotting its own services.
1) Establishing itself (at least in part...even a part as small as an office building) as a business in the United States...You sue in the United States, you're a legal target in the United States, plain and simple.
What part of the Sklyarov / Abode E-books thing did you miss? You are already falling under US jurisdiction if you do a portion of your business with US customers. Now, the US can rule all it wants, but it can't put the equivalent of a lien on a bank in Morocco without approval of the Moroccan court system. They could take the American office, but I'm sure that's rented.
If you had read the article, you would know that they are suing not for the right to illegally distribute content, but that they are suing because the RIAA had illegally prevented Kazaa from licensing content.
In Go, this would be called a KO fight. This does not preclude or even reference the legal challenge against Kazaa's network, but in response to that it challenges an illegal practice of the music industry which could shut it down. One could destroy the other, or vice versa. The industry would seem to have the upper hand with more lawyers, but if you read the wired article (now mysteriously down) Kazaa has an amazing network of cross-border legal hurdles necessary for the music industry to jump before cutting off the company that produces the software, at which point the software will still be functional and loose in the wild. They have an amazingly large number of liberties (again, GO), and both sides are vulnerable.
That fight, sadly, will probably go to the money. But a slap on the wrist by the judge might be enough to require the companies open up to actual licensing of online content, as opposed to shutting down competitors. The justice system is currently terrified of bringing to justice anything large, but Java is now shipping with Windows. Kazaa *might* have enough legal wiggleroom to then license content and have the previous charges thrown out on the grounds that they weren't holding their copyrights properly.
In other words, if they play the game good enough, they can force the music industry into licensing to them, transition to a probably much more profitable paid service, and come out the other side squeaky clean. Whatever lawyer thought this up earned their paycheck.
How did this parent get modded up to 5 insightful? He obviously didn't read the article.
I thought the courts had already ruled that making copies of your music for close friends was fair use, and who in turn could make copies for other people. If I'm remembering correctly, it is illegal for the friend to come over and copy your disks, but you can do it for them.
Still, while I somehow I doubt the theoretical fair use construct would hold up under the weight of 5 GB of material, I have seen friendly trading exceed that by several orders of magnitude.
Since fair use isn't written into law, we can't exactly look it up. Still though, it's good to know there are new ways besides drug laws to turn promising young men and women into lifetime criminals.
Interesting idea. How about the 3 stooges effect? Use a much hyped and "loved" band's soon-to-be-released video and single to carry a bomb? Like the Star Wars trailer attached to Wing Commander (ironically both series Mark Hammill was attached to)? Along with those boring trailers for movies you don't want to see, and quizzes that wouldn't challenge a 3 year old, you could have the latest Janet Jackson video blasted in front of thousands of eager listeners who paid, in part, to watch the video. What better way to make sales than project a video across a 2 story screen with Digital THX sound and a captive audience?
Love the Fugees? They're playing with "How to lose a guy" at a theartre near you.
This sounds like it could really work. So on second thought, let's never mention this again.
-c
Of course, this kind of synergy happens all the time, as more movies are being (ab)used as platforms to promote bands the label/movie studio wants to sell. Joss did a great service to many small bands by including them in episodes of Buffy, but that power is now being abused to try and make hip the stale.
And for that matter, 8 mile. Eww. Let's never mention *that* again either.
According to the NY Times Article it is actually only 1 dollar per song. However, Kazaa has completed 7 uploads in the past 3 hours, so the final total stands similarly.
If I'm not mistaken, Corel perished because their focus on cross-platform sales drove them to a misguided two-year development deathmarch into the realm of Java. Porting an entire application suite onto the slowest platform known to man is a good way to never reach a releasable product. Use limewire recently? Would you pay for Limewire? Can you imagine how slow Limewire would be with an inline spellchecker, hyperlinking, dynamic formatting, and hundreds of other clock-nabbing goodies? On computers from several years ago?
According to one of the developers I have spoken with, once optimized it took over 30 seconds to launch.
As WRT Microsoft... I would expect that a Linux port, while eating into their desktop hegemony, would only serve to reinforce their file-format hegemony upon which it is based. If they added an intrinsic windows tax, an extra 200 dollars for Office Linux due to "low demand, complexity of programming in that environment," they could really undermine OpenOffice, Kword, and all of the other desktop suites whose existance on corporate networks is only currently "justified" because the platforms they run on can't run Word. MS keeps office hegemony, and prevents Linux file format problems from truly cracking Windows hegemony.
If it wasn't indexed before, it is now. 1AM EST.
-c
I love Kde (2.x), so I'll respond.
Red Hat obviously has a strategy of simplifying their interface and options, and standardizing across their default installations. As Red Hat gets used more for servers than desktops, the choice of KDE or Gnome seems kind of ridiculous. "Do you want that sandal to come with the velvet or suede winter boot cover option?" If I want a computer to be bogged down in UI, I would (and do) install Mandrake. If I want a svelte sverver install across many machines with service, Red Hat would be a good option. Do I care if I can write shell scripts in Koffice? Not really.
If anything, a dropping of KDE would allow Red Hat to focus on what it does best, and would make clearer the distinction between several different distros. I say go for it, my felt fedora friends. KDE away! And the mice shall play.
-C
Having tested (and deleted) a copy of the beautiful Maya rendering program with pixar extensions protected by flexim, I can assure you it hasn't been silenced.
The grandparent to this post is right, Flexim works because it provides an authoratative, though not necessarily effective, way to keep your legal licencees in line. Who cares if a group of smart 18 year olds with absolutely nothing else to do all day can crack it in a months? Our youth have always been more intelligent than we gave them credit for, but our youth don't go on to make feature-length multimillion dollar films, or the other uses that flexim protects against.
I hate to point this out, but as i mentioned on another thread, at bare minimum settings and assuming an 80% failure rate, Kazaa transfers 1 song every hour and a half. At 20 dollars per cd, the RIAA could push it as high as $2.50 per track, which over the course of 6 months would put you comfortably in the realm of 12 thousand dollars.
You can still leech safely and face only civil penalties, but any real amount of noding will push you over $1,000 easily. I have seen computers upload that much AT ONE TIME.
Still, if they grab 100 sharers as test cases, and there is 4 million users on right now, with 10% of them sharing, you only have a 1 in 40,000 chance of getting nabbed. The test cases will probably find adequate legal representation, as I know for one I will contribute to a legal defense fund of those who believe music wants to be free, or at least less than 20 dollars a f'ing CD.
2. According to RIAA figures, only 1 in 10 bands it has hand-signed and selected is profitable. What they forget to mention, leaving you to connect the dots yourself, is that "profitable" means that they made money above and beyond recoupable costs. The Distributing companies wind up eating some costs, but so far the band has made *nothing at all.* Under such circumstances, it would be a lot better to make 50c per album straight than nothing at all. Perhaps we should sell album downloads at 1.00 each, just to make sure the rate is higher than the industry's payout for extremely successful acts?
3. The recording companies are very profitable. The artists are not. There are a lot of artists out there, which loweres their bargining position, but they are the ones who actually make music. The recording companies sell acts: they have no capacity to make music. You don't really need them to get onboard... if I could find DJ Entropy on a paid Kazaa system, why would I want the latest scruffy guitar punk ripoff band?* It would be good for selection to have labels onboard, but it would also be great for quality to have just indies.
Of course, Entropy gives away his albums on his home page, which is one of many reasons why I go out of my way to pay to see him live.
4. This system would give leechers a choice: you can be free or you can be a leech, but you can't be both. I think this choice will satisfy most people. And while it may drive away some of the leeches... isn't that the point? Doesn't that make your network all the better to be a part of?
Anyway, I think this could really work. The only downside I can see is having more sharers than downloaders, as I tend to think that more people would rather have free music legally while uploading than pay to legally download music while leeching. Of course, many of these people don't have jobs and / or credit cards, so I don't fault them.
More ideas?
*This is not to rile against scruffy guitar punk ripoff bands... this is to rile against the scruffy guitar punk ripoff bands who have carefully manicured holes cut in CK shirts and who have an equally manicured sound to appeal to this generation youth extremism with the previous generation of musical voice knockoff.
Interesting, I don't think I can buy any of the MP3's I have on my computer... They're all ripped from CD's. Does that mean the RIAA gets to set the retail CD price, and set it equivalent to the price they recently were (all but) convicted of fixing at a tremendous markup?
If you assume 20 dollars per retail CD, with 8 songs per album, you're docked 2 and a half dollars per album. That's 400 songs, or 30 real albums (albums with more than 8 songs... Kind of like the equivalent of 421 CD Burners). If you have ripped a portion of your CD collection to your drive, that should be enough to push you over the theoretical limit, and somehow I doubt you will be able to convince the judge to look at your Kazaa preferences file to prove that you are only sharing legal fansub anime.
On the other hand, it does say that this distribution must occur during a 180 day period, which would imply that it is not enough to just have music on your machine, but you must actively upload 400 songs in 6 months... or about two per day, irrespective of the total on your hard drive. This sort of rate would be difficult to prove, though I tend to think that judges would accept an average rate extrapolated to a long period of time, rather than requiring the justice department to tap your line for 400 songs. I've seen an older client serve more than that at a single time, but newer ones tend to throttle that to something that won't DOS itself. Still, a newer client throttled down to 3KBps, with sharing on for only one person, can theoretically serve up a song every 16 minutes. If we assume that half of the time the computer sits idle, and 80% of song transfers are aborted / fail %50 of the way through, You get a successful song transfer ($2.50) every hour and a half. If you leave your computer running all of the time (but, as previously mentioned, Kazaa only half the time), you are stealing $6,480 dollars every 180 days from Bertlesman's pockets. Assuming the previous success rates, and the minimum bandwidth / transfer settings for non-scrubs, you would need to have Kazaa running for less than 1.8 hours per day. Not terribly hard, but it is primarily a background task. Perhaps it is time to share only indies and bands with talent?
Does Kazaa leave logs?